My name is Kenji.
As I pronounced these words in English I wondered why we have so many ways of saying the same thing in Japanese. Hard-boiled: Ore no na wa Kenji da. Polite: Watashi wa Kenji to moshimasu. Casual: Boku wa Kenji. Gay: Atashi Kenji ’te iu no yo!
“Oh, so you’re Kenji!” The overweight American tourist made a big show of being delighted to see me. “Nice to meet you,” I said and shook his hand. This was near Seibu Shinjuku Station, at a hotel that might rate about two-and-a-half stars overseas. A moment I won’t forget—the first time I ever met Frank.
I had just turned twenty, and though my English is far from perfect I was working as a “nightlife guide” for foreign tourists. Basically I specialize in what you might call sex tours, so it’s not as if my English needs to be flawless. Since AIDS, the sex industry hasn’t exactly welcomed foreigners with open arms—in fact, most of the clubs are pretty blatant about refusing service to gaijin—but lots of visitors from overseas are still determined to play, and they’re the ones who pay me to guide them to relatively safe cabarets and massage parlors and S&M bars and “soaplands” and what have you. I’m not employed by a company and don’t even have an office, but by running a simple ad in an English-language tourist magazine I make enough to rent a nice studio apartment in Meguro, take my girl out for Korean barbecue once in a while, and listen to the music I like and read the things I want to read.
I should mention, though, that my mother, who runs a little clothes shop in Shizuoka Prefecture, thinks I’m enrolled in a college preparation course. Mom brought me up on her own after Dad died when I was fourteen. I had friends back in high school who thought nothing of slapping their own mothers around, but you’d never catch me hurting mine. Much as I hate to disappoint Mom, though, I have no plans to go to college. I definitely don’t have the background in science and math to go for a professional degree, and all a degree in “the arts” would get me is a cubicle in an office somewhere. My dream, not that I’ve ever had much hope of realizing it, is to save up a fair amount of money and go to America.
“Is this Kenji Tours? My name’s Frank, I’m a tourist from the United States of America?”
When the phone rang, late in the morning of December 29 last year, I was reading a newspaper article about this high-school girl who’d been murdered. According to the article, her corpse had been dumped at a trash collection site in a relatively untraveled alley in the Kabuki-cho district of Shinjuku with her arms, legs, and head cut off. The victim had been one of a group of high-school girls who openly peddled sex in the area and was well known at nearby “love hotels.” No eyewitnesses had come forward, and investigators had no solid leads as yet. The article went on to editorialize that one’s heart went out to the victim, of course, but perhaps this incident would help instill in today’s teens a proper understanding of the potential horror behind those fashionable words “compensated dating,” and that all the girls in the victim’s group had now sworn off what they flippantly refer to as “selling it.”
“Hi, Frank.” I tossed the newspaper on the table and gave him my standard greeting. “How you doing?”
